


even a worm will turn

by telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Demons, Gen, Jennifer's body au, Murder, POV Second Person, Unhealthy Relationships, Vomiting, multiple references to Blink182
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 23:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9407543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: He looks away from you, then looks back again, as if he’s deciding whether or not he should talk to you. He shrugs, affecting a kind of casual he can’t quite pull off. “Why’d you do it, man?”Why’d you do it, man? Where ‘it’ means ‘murder me’ and ‘man’ means ‘best friend’.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is like............. The most niche, self-indulgent thing I've ever written, probably, but !!!!! I went ahead and wrote it anyway and now it exists :') I borrowed heavily from the film but the character dynamics are switched around.. lmao
> 
> huge huge thanks to my wife and beta [kii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) ;o

You stare at him as you would a ghost. You have absolutely no idea how he’s standing before you.

He looks like he did hours—no, _days_ ago now, when you pushed his mangled, mottled corpse into a shallow grave and threw some topsoil and bracken over it. He looks like he clawed and crawled his way back up through the earth; every inch of him is covered in the grit of damp, black dirt. There’s thick swatches of dark, dried blood on his collar, on his sweater, in his hair, but he still _reeks_ of old copper. Like he’s still _alive,_ somehow, and his body is still pushing fresh blood out of the wounds in his head. From the blows that took a lifetime to finish him off and made you understand just how fucking terrifying it is to crack another human’s skull open like an egg.

But you don’t think you really cracked it, looking at it now. One side of his petrified, pale face is just _blood,_ but it’s still… well… still _intact_ , to say the least. You remember quite vividly that you got a few good clouts in before his face started to pulp and pancake in the worst possible way.

You wonder if he really is a corpse. He _smells_ like you imagine a corpse would. Like damp forest rot, like unwashed hair, like meat that’s dropped down the back of the counter and turned bad. Like no amount of hot water and soap will wash the stink out of him.

 _Oh god,_ you think, your eyes flicking down. By his side, he’s still clutching the skateboard you bludgeoned him to death (near-death?) with. Two wheels are missing, one end of it has broken off, the goddamn thing was actually _stuck_ in his temple at one point, and yet here it is, hanging under his arm, still painted in his own blood. Classic Czerny. The only thing more ridiculous and incomprehensible at this stage would be to see him try to ride it.

You look back at his face. He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at you like… like you took everything from him, and he doesn’t understand. You were his best friend, and he was yours, and he doesn’t understand why you did that. There’s a chilling, _haunted_ look to his face now that you don’t think the promise of some Wonka Nerds and a new Blink182 album will make disappear. Besides, it’s not as if you can afford any of that shit now.

You swallow the lump in your throat. “Czerny…”

No response. You wonder if maybe all that beating scrambled his brains and he’s seconds from forgetting how to breathe, but he does eventually start to amble forward like a depressed zombie. You’re forced to move aside or come into contact with a boy you were _pretty fucking sure_ you had killed, but evidently not.

You want to ask him to clean up somewhere else before he puts bloodied, dirtied handprints on everything, but you find that your throat has closed up. So you just watch on, curious and unnerved, as he advances further into the room.

He walks to his desk. What’s left of his skateboard clatters to the floor as he pries open the mini fridge with fingers caked in dirt.

You try again, “Czerny?” but he’s far too interested in the contents of the fridge, which, to the best of your knowledge, is just two half-emptied pizza boxes and his second attempt at making vodka gummies. He pulls out one box, a meat lovers, and starts shoving cold slices into his mouth like he hasn’t eaten in… days.

Your nose wrinkles. It’s only moderately worse than his standard dinner etiquette, but he’s stuffing his face with another piece before he’s even finished the first one, barely chewing. Bits of half-masticated base and salami fly out of his mouth, drop to the floor.

It’s already hard to watch. But then he reaches for _your_ pizza box and he’s gone too far.

“Hey,” you say, but he doesn’t hear you. _“Hey.”_

You storm over, but your threatening presence doesn’t even slow him down. He hoovers up a chunk of your pizza like he just did his own, and you snatch the box from his grimy fingers before he can take anymore. You’re dirt fucking broke now; you can’t afford to chuck away leftovers. “Czerny, that’s _my pizza,_ you dick.”

Out of nowhere he lets out a _screech_ that curdles your blood and makes you instantly let the box go. You watch him with wide, panicked eyes as he abruptly quiets and stills after one last swallow. He fixes you with a stare you can only place as _disturbed_ before he suddenly drops to his knees and utters the kind of gurgling, guttural noises that precede vomit.

“Oh no,” you mutter, horrified. “No, no—Czerny, _no._ ”

You seize his dirty, damp shoulder and try to push him out of the room, but you can’t make him move; even just brushing his cold skin calls to some strange evolutionary fear buried within your psyche that makes you want to _run._ “Czerny, fuckin’ _move!”_

His retches turn full-bodied, and as you stumble away, bracing yourself for the splashback of bile and chunks of mushed pizza, what you get instead is… _black._ Tar-like gunk that he spews out across the floor, catching your feet in the deluge, and a noise like there’s a garbage disposal unit in the back of his throat.

You stumble back further, leaving a trail of black footprints, slamming into the far wall. You stare at him open-mouthed and terrified beyond all belief.

Czerny gurgles, then hiccups, then wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

 _“…What the fuck, Czerny?”_ you yell. _“What the goddamn FUCK?”_

He doesn’t look at you. He pushes himself back up to his feet like he’s the marionette to a first-time puppeteer. He walks, stilted and disjointed and like something out of a horror flick, coming right for you, closing in on you, like _death_ closing in on you, but then he puts out a hand for the doorknob. You eagerly get it for him, and hold open the door to let him stagger out of the room.

You slam the door and lock it as soon as he’s out.

For a few moments you feel too overwhelmed to do anything but stand there and cry. You’ve cried so many times these past couple of days – out of grief, out of desperation, out of shame and scorn for your criminal father – but this time it was pure, unmitigated fear that brought on your tears. You’ve never been so scared in your entire life. You have _literally killed another boy,_ and not even that particular brand of horror could come close. At least bodies did what you expected them to when you felled them. At least they didn’t puke incomprehensible darkness and shake you to your entire core with how _unnatural_ they were. At least they were _human._

But that was no human. That was… something parading around in the skin of a human.

After a minute or two, you find your composure. You rid your face of tears and look over to check that you had in fact just witnessed Czerny vomit up something from the nether and didn’t just hallucinate the whole incident. But no. It’s still there. Sticky and shiny and somehow emitting a small noise like razors scraping together. It doesn’t look safe to touch, but it’s been on your feet for minutes now and hasn’t consumed you. You rub some away with your sleeve, at least able to find some solace that it comes off like everything else.

You stare at the tar mess, out of your depth. Czerny normally did the cleaning, but you’d already come to terms with the fact that you’d have to get someone else to do it once you… removed him. But you don’t have even $100 to offload this hellscape onto a dorm cleaner. Not to mention you wouldn’t be able to explain _what it is_ and where it came from.

 _It’s fine,_ you lie to yourself. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. You’ll just… fetch a bucket, fill it with soapy water, grab a mop. It’ll be gone in no time.

It takes until dawn to get it out of the cracks.

 

The next day you fall asleep in class. You’re only aware you’ve fallen asleep in class once your history teacher slaps his hand down onto your desk, and you jolt into the waking world with his face inches from yours. “The Soviet Union too _boring_ for you, Mr Whelk?”

“No, Sir,” you say, sitting up straight. In truth, you only bothered to show up for class today because you wanted to hear more stories from the Soviet era, but not even those could keep your eyes open for more than twenty minutes. You feel your cheeks heat up; you’re not used to people staring. “I’m sorry, Sir. It won’t happen again.”

The teacher sighs, withdraws himself to the front of the classroom. “If you absolutely _must_ sleep in someone’s class, Mr Whelk, just don’t make it mine.”

“Sorry, Sir,” you repeat for good measure, and it’s enough to get him back on schedule.

Then a voice like Czerny’s whispers, “Whelk,” from your right, and you jump so hard you almost topple out of your chair.

“ _Mr Whelk,”_ the teacher bellows, and you strain to keep yourself composed, heart pounding in your chest.

“ _Sorry,_ sorry,” you call out, and make a show of writing down all the notes from the projector. You wait until the teacher’s back is turned to look over at Czerny, and the sight of him stops your heart. “Czerny…”

He doesn’t smile, like he normally does. You’d reason that it’s because he’s still a little upset that you would murder him in cold blood just to further your own selfish needs, but now you’re wondering if you’re even looking at the same person you did the night before. This Czerny actually _looks_ like Czerny should. His skin is white as milk, hair as fluffy and fair as pampas grass, and there’s not a spec of blood on his uniform. There aren’t even any bags under his eyes, and you have _never_ seen Czerny without any bags under his eyes.

You continue to gawk at him, unable to speak. “Czerny… how…?”

He looks away from you, then looks back again, as if he’s deciding whether or not he should talk to you. He shrugs, affecting a kind of casual he can’t quite pull off. “Why’d you do it, man?”

 _Why’d you do it, man?_ Where ‘it’ means ‘murder me’ and ‘man’ means ‘best friend’.

You’re a little too shocked to answer that.

Minutes of gaping at Czerny must just fly by, because soon enough the bell for lunch chimes and students begin to file neatly out of the room. Czerny also collects his textbooks – even though you _swear_ you haven’t seen him all morning – and you seize his sweater before he can think to leave without first telling you what the _fuck_ is going on.

“H-hey,” he complains as you grab at him. You hold him in place as you touch his warm dry cheek, prod the temple that you _know_ caved in under the blow of his own skateboard. You stare in awe.

You lean in a little to sniff his neck and he shoves you off, laughing, “What the hell, man! Did you just _smell_ me?”

You did. And he smelt fine. Like a near-lethal amount of Lynx body spray and fruity girls’ shampoo and breakfast energy drinks, but fine. Like the very opposite of death.

You’re still speechless, so he shakes his head at you and tries to leave. “You’re so out of it today. I’ll catch you later though, yeah?”

You’re not letting him leave. “We’re skiving,” you decide and yank on his arm, pulling him away from the classroom. He staggers after you, barely keeping up, until you both escape the school grounds without drawing the notice of any staff.

Once you’re in the clear, Czerny pulls a packet of candy out of his pocket and starts picking out his favourites. “Where are we going?”

You stare at him. “Seriously, Czerny? ‘ _Where are we going?’_ Why don’t you tell me what the _fuck_ that was last night, hm? Why don’t you tell me why you showed up lookin’ like a corpse and then ate all the pizza, which you then _fucking threw up—_ only you didn’t throw up pizza, you threw up _fucking black gunk!_ Weird, gross _gunk_ that I spent _all fucking night cleaning up!”_

You emphasis this last point by waving your grimy hands at him. He looks away uncomfortably. “I’m _sorry,_ okay? I was… I was hungry. Like, really hungry.”

You can’t believe him. You angrily shove your hand into the packet and take a few candies from him. “No _shit._ Where the fuck were you? I thought I’d…” You don’t want to say it. You’re not going to say it. “I thought you were gone.”

Czerny thinks about that for a moment. “Huh… Guess I wasn’t. ‘Cos I’m still here.”

You scrub one hand down your face. “Why yes, Czerny, you _are_ still here, aren’t you? Care to shed a little light on that?”

He looks at you, munching away. God, his teeth will all be dead before he’s even hit his mid-20s. “I think you did it wrong.”

“Did what wrong?”

He pops a few more candies in his mouth and speaks around them. “The ritual.”

 _“No,_ Czerny, the ritual worked _._ Okay? I still woke the ley line, even without all the set-up. I did that shit.”

“Oh.” He shrugs, at a loss for an explanation. “Well then… it’s fine, right?”

“No it’s not _fine,_ you—” You’re still not going to say it. You stop, turn him toward you, and say into his face, _“You were dead._ You were _buried._ But, somehow, _you are still here._ Tell me how that is possible!”

He looks off into the distance. He tries to put another candy in his mouth, but you’re holding his arms in place.

You think he knows. Something about his blank face tells you that he knows and just doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Can we go to _Nino’s?”_ he asks.

“No. I don’t want to see you eat pizza ever again,” you say, and he lets out a breathy laugh. You ease up your hold on him. “Look… you forgive me, right? You know why… You know why I _had to,_ right? Why I really need that favour now?”

He gives a faraway nod. You pat him twice.

“Cool. So… I mean, it’s good that you’re still here. Fuckin’ terrifying, but good.”

He smiles at you. “You think I’m terrifying?”

“Just a little bit, yeah. Hey, did you pick up your Mustang?”

 

You knew as soon as you returned to the dorm that night, you knew your ritual had worked and your sacrifice had been accepted. As you stayed up well into the early hours, hunched over the bathroom sink, scrubbing the blood and dirt from under your nails until your fingers were red and sore, you felt the ley line start to thrive. It was finally awake, _wide_ awake at that, and you watched with bated breath as the sconce above you flickered and burned with every wave of raw energy the ley pulsed out. For just a second you forgot about Czerny. Instead you imagined that somewhere, buried beneath all the whispering coppices and ancient trunks, a sleeping king was rolling over in his grave, begging for another five months.

Five months? Oh no, there was no way you were going to live broke for another five months. You were going to work _twice_ as hard as you had been to find Glendower. With the ley awakened, you expected your quest to wake Glendower to be over in a matter of _minutes,_ and all of your family’s riches — your McMansion back in D.C., your continued education at Aglionby, your flashy cars, your success and your _future —_ would be saved from liquidation, from repossession, from your father’s shady transactions and criminal reputation. You’d get that favour.

You’d make it all okay.

 

Even with as little money as you now have, you still buy him a new skateboard. You feel like it’s the absolute least you could do. And even after all the proof that Czerny almost _died_ starts to fade with time, his broken and battered skateboard seems to remain. Now he sports something that’s a mix of glittery black and eye-burner green, and he’s already plastering every sticker in sight to the underside of it. You chastise him for it, tease him for it, but you still watch him with an odd sort of fondness heavy in your chest as he sits on his bed and peels a Low Shoulder sticker into the middle.

It doesn’t take a full day for the two of you to pick up where you left off, with you as the charismatic leader and him your hapless lackey, on the hunt for a sleeping king. You forge an unspoken agreement; you don’t mention it and he pretends it never happened. The ley line pulses louder and stronger than ever, brimming with magic, and while you both agree that that’s a splendid thing, neither of you dwell on the sacrifice you both made to make it work.

It’s strange, though, that Czerny would be returned to you. You’re not _disappointed_ by any means, of course. You’re just confused.

It’s like nothing was ever lost.

 

A few days later, rumours flood the halls of a student who died, mere hours before the school holds an assembly to confirm these rumours. He was only an oil baron’s boy that you had very little to do with, but he was a fellow student nonetheless, and your sympathies went out to his family and friends all the same, you suppose. It wasn’t until later that you learned a little more than you’d bargained; acquaintances told you that the boy had been dead for days, mutilated and stuffed into an old tank on the roof of the school. That it was only the complaints from the top floor about the _smell_ that forced staff to look for a boy who had otherwise been written off as a runaway.

The smell…

It’s a surreal development in an otherwise mundane world, and you’re a little surprised that you had to learn it from someone _other_ than Czerny. Usually he’s front and centre when it comes to ghost stories and supernatural anecdotes, having fabricated and circulated many himself. But, for once, he’s barely involved at all in the rumours.

“Did you hear about Jimmy Matthews?” you ask casually after dinner, as you’re both walking to his red Mustang. Czerny nods. “His roommate said that, when they found him on the roof, he looked like he’d been attacked by a wild animal. His arm was missing. It looked like he’d been partially cannibalised.”

You look at Czerny. Still no response.

“Really? You don’t care?”

“Yeah, it’s sad.”

You throw an irked look at him. “It’s not _sad,_ Czerny, it’s horrific. What if we have a psycho killer in our midst? You know, you’ll be one of their first targets. Everyone knows Blink182 is what all the Satanists listen to.”

“Y’know, it’s funny,” he says, “that you don’t think of yourself as a psycho killer.”

You stop. Czerny stops too a few seconds later, and you stare at him like he may as well have struck you. _“Christ,_ Czerny…”

He bows his head, miserable and ashamed. “S-sorry. I’m just… tired. And kinda hungry.”

“Well, yeah. You hardly touched your food.”

He rubs the back of his neck, shoulders hunched. “I don’t think I can go out tonight. I just want to stay in, watch some _Buffy_ or something.”

“But you’re my assistant,” you insist, and he shrugs. “C’mon. We’ll go to _Ben & Jerry’s _after. You can get us a triple choc fudge sundae, or whatever it is you want. We’ll share.”

“Maybe tomorrow… sorry, Whelk.”

The warmth leaves your eyes. “Keys, then,” you say, holding out your palm. He looks about halfway to a protest before he just gives in and hands them over. He half-heartedly waves and walks off without you, back to the dorms.

“Traitor,” you call out, and he winces.

 

A few weeks later and it’s like you’re rooming with someone in palliative care. He shuffles from class to class, from bed to shower, like he’s started to really internalise some of those depressing lyrics he listens to, about how life is all glow sticks and meaninglessness. And he barely talks anymore. All he does is lie in bed and watch TV.

You stand at the end of his bed at one o’clock on a Saturday, which is late for him and even later for you. You can’t tell if he’s sick or just hasn’t showered yet. His skin is waxy and his hair is greasy and there’s a smell like something died in the sheets there with him.

“Hey.” You kick his bed; he jolts, but doesn’t otherwise move. “Hey, c’mon. It’s the weekend. Glendower isn’t going to wake himself up.”

To your chagrin, Czerny disappears further under his covers. You grab them and throw them off angrily. _“Czerny, come on!_ You said you’d do this with me! What, are you sick? Bullshit – you can’t fuckin’ back out now ‘cos of a little cold!”

But it’s hard to chalk it up to the common cold when he looks like that. That’s a treatable, human thing. Whatever he has is a throwback to the awful state you saw him in after he scrambled out of his own grave, save for the blood and the dirt. Now he just looks… dead.

“I can’t,” he rasps at you with pale, chapped lips. He’s been sleeping for something approaching fourteen hours now and still has purple under his eyes.

“C’mon, push through it.” You shove at his legs, and your skin crawls to feel just how cold and clammy he is. You find yourself rubbing your hand on your chinos long after you’ve stopped touching him. “Come _on,_ we’re wasting valuable daylight here!”

“I said I _can’t._ ”

“You _can_.”

“I _fucking can’t!”_ he yells, and the venomous look he shoots you chills you to the bone. His eyes flickered. You don’t know how to describe it—they _changed_ in some sort of illusory way that you can’t really place now that you’re staring at his normal brown eyes again. It’s like, for a second, his eyes shimmered yellow and lethal. Inhuman _._

“…Whatever,” you mumble, and haul your ass out of there.

 

You hear of another grizzly murder before you’re even back at Aglionby. Another ripped-open torso, another blood-drained corpse, another student that too-closely matches your description.

Your grip tightens on the Mustang’s steering wheel. You turn the radio off because it’s only thirty seconds into the report and you’ve heard just about all that you can stomach.

God, you wish this wasn’t happening. You wish this unexpected series of events weren’t unfolding with you and your increasingly-urgent quest smack in the middle of it. You wish you still had a cell phone, and that you could call your folks and ask them to have you relocated to a different school. You wish you didn’t have to be _thankful_ that you at least still have a roof over your head, even if that roof in all likelihood also housed a rampaging, sadistic cannibal.

You wish you had enough money to buy some goddamn food.

You arrive back at Aglionby just in time for dinner to be served, but dinner is the furthest thing from everyone’s mind. You seem to have missed most of the action, but roadblocks policed by fluro-vested men force you to park Czerny’s Mustang down the street. You lock up the car and grit your teeth as you force your way back in, flashing your school ID, loathing the idea that these assholes will be a permanent fixture of the place until the killer is found. Having a _killer_ at large is annoying enough, but you hate that the ensuing curfews and lockdowns are going to impede your search for Glendower.

There’s a crowd of bustling, crammed students in the hall that you’re redirected to when you try to make it back to your dorm. You look around, hoping to see Czerny, if only to put your mind at ease that he wasn’t the maniac’s easy pickings. But you can’t see a sickly, pale little boy bundled up in blankets anywhere.

What you see instead is a perfectly healthy, bright-eyed and clean-clothed Czerny, sitting alone and glum.

Your eye twitches.

You stalk up to him and kick the skateboard out from under his feet before he even sees you coming. “So you _were_ faking it, you lousy piece of shit.”

He waves his hands around, alarmed. “Whelk, no—”

“I can’t fuckin’ believe you! My own _best friend!”_

He shuts you up when he grabs your leg with the kind of ferocity that… he just did not have before. You look into his eyes and they are burning.

He says, “I think we need to talk…”

 

It takes a while to find a place quiet enough to hear and not be overheard, whilst also away from the patrol of armed police officers, but you eventually both slip into a dim bathroom on an empty corridor.

Czerny checks that there’s no one in the stalls before he turns back to you, anxious and agitated. “Whelk…”

You cross your arms. “Well? Spit it out. Before the killer finds us.”

He flinches, and it’s a flinch that too vividly reminds you of the flinch he made when you first struck him over the head that day in the woods. He rubs at his cheek, but there’s nothing there.

“The killer is not going to find us,” he murmurs, head lowered.

You scoff. “Oh yeah? How do you know who the killer is?”

When Czerny looks up at you then, it may as well be with the words ‘IT’S ME’ scribbled all over his perfectly clean, perfectly healthy face. The only thing sickening about it now is the guilt. His bottom lip is trembling and his eyes are rimmed with tears.

You raise your eyebrows. _“Is_ it you? Fuck. I was just kidding about the Blink182 thing.”

He lets out a sob poorly mixed with a laugh, and then he cries into his balled-up hands.

Your mouth twists. You can’t think of what to do, other than awkwardly pat his shoulder, but even that might be a little too much comfort for a boy who just admitted to being a crazed murderer. You’re not even sure if you should touch him; it’s only been a few hours since his last kill.

So you just stare at him, wondering how a little lost lamb like Czerny could turn out to be such a wolf.

“Why do you do it, Czerny?” you ask him very carefully, like one misplaced word will provoke him. “Why do you kill?”

He shakes his head, still buried in his hands, body wracked with shivers and shakes. He subjects you to his ugly crying face to warble out, _“Your ritual didn’t work.”_

You didn’t catch a word of that. “…Pardon?”

 _“The ritual,”_ he cries, wiping tears and snot onto his sleeve. He’s shaking like a leaf. “It didn’t… I didn’t…”

He starts up again.

“Oh for Chrissake, Czerny,” you sigh. You hold him up to stare him in his ruddy, tear-stained face. “C’mon, what about the ritual?”

Czerny averts his eyes, crestfallen. “It… The sacrifice… I’m not how I used to be. I’m not… Whelk, I don’t think I’m human.”

You blink. “You’ve never been human, Czerny,” you say, and he pushes weakly at you.

“I’m _serious!_ I-I need to… to eat _people,_ or else I get… so, so hungry.” He sniffs and rakes a sleeve over his eyes. His voice is so gravelly, it’s hard to make out. “I’m a monster. Whelk, you… you turned me into a monster. When you murdered me…”

Guilt tries to crash over you, but you fight the tide. You rub the side of his skull, where it caved in, and he tenses. “Look, Czerny, there’s nothing there. I didn’t kill you after all. Some… some demonic force got you, I suppose, but you’re fine. You’re still _here,_ aren’t you? Didn’t we agree that’s the only thing that matters? That you’re still here, with me?”

His mouth falls open, horrified. “I’ve been _killing people!”_

You shrug. “So? It’s nobody we know. But maybe next time you should uh, rethink about your environment a bit better, hm? Maybe don’t kill boys who live in the same dorm as us. Let’s be smart about this.”

Tears are still dripping down his face. He’s gaping at you like you’re the real monster here.

“Look, Czerny, I’ll _help_ you,” you insist, shaking him.

“I don’t want to _kill people, Whelk! I’m not like you!”_

You nearly wince. “Fine, starve then.”

He squeezes his eyes closed and shakes his drooping head. He starts to sink to the floor, too much weight for you to keep supporting, and you drop him. His voice comes out a tight whine. “Everything is just so _fucked._ This is _fucked. Up.”_

You turn your ear towards the door. Distantly you can hear the crowd start to disperse. “Are you done? We need to get back.”

“Whelk…” Noah takes a fistful of your pants and you look down at him. You have to say, for all the many times you’ve claimed Noah Czerny to be the most pathetic-looking creature in the history of mankind, this image trumps all. On the bathroom floor, hand clutching your pant leg, eyes red and teary and on you, only you. Your assistant, your lackey, your best friend. “Whelk… Whelk…”

You wait for him to say real words, but all he does is repeat your name. Your grab his hoodie and haul him back up to his feet.

You hold open the door for him and push him out first. “Just play it cool, Czerny. Don’t say a word. If anyone asks, you were in your room, sleeping off a cold all day. You didn’t hear or see shit.”

 

You are in fact asked the next day if you saw or heard shit, pertaining to the murders of the two boys. You’re angry that you have to spend your Sunday on campus, but there’s nothing you can do about that, lest you run the risk of getting caught and having your liberties halved even more. No, instead you spend the day in groups of no less than three, wandering from interrogation to grief counselling back to some more interrogation.

You’re waiting outside your dorm room with Czerny while some asshole searches it for bloodied knives or severed limbs, or whatever it is they’re hoping will turn up. You watch irritably from the doorway as a man in a uniform upturns mattresses, opens drawers, and spends an uncomfortably long time peeking in the closets.

Beside you, Czerny is restless with nerves. “Skateboard,” he breathes.

You look at him. “What?”

 _“Skateboard,”_ he stresses. “It’s…”

From inside the room, the man demands, “What’s this?” as he unearths the broken, battered skateboard from behind Czerny’s bed. He holds it up for the two of you to see just how caked on the months-old blood is, and you realise there’s absolutely no way you can pass that substance off as anything other than what it is.

Czerny begins, “Uhh—”

“That’s his old skateboard,” you interrupt. “And that’s his blood. He fucked up his leg real bad. He’s lucky to be alive.”

The man raises an eyebrow at Czerny. “So why’d you keep it?”

“He loves the stickers,” you say for him.

“Was I talking to you?” the man barks at you. “Let him speak.”

“S-Stickers,” Czerny stammers, his hand coming up to rub his cheek. The same cheek that had been met with the blunt end of that same skateboard several times over. “The stickers…”

The man doesn’t look very appeased by either of you. “I’m taking this,” he says, placing the skateboard into a black bag. He doesn’t say another word as he stomps out of the room in his thick army boots, and you both slink back inside once he’s found another room to rummage through.

You close and lock the door while Czerny curls up on his bed.

 _“God,_ these bastards. They think just because the next building over is a crime scene they can stroll into anyone’s room and take anything they want. Fuck ‘em. Anyway, why’d you still have that thing? I thought you’d chucked it ages ago.”

Czerny doesn’t answer you. He just holds his pillow tighter over his head.

It’s almost funny, you think. The man _did_ find himself a murder weapon.

Just not the one he was looking for.

 

Since you’re on lockdown for the indeterminable future, you turn your Glendower search efforts towards academia rather than field work. You start looking for keywords in the library like ‘demons’ and ‘botched rituals’ and ‘cannibalism’, which yield a lot more occult results than you can bear to sieve through, but you do find a small except than you must’ve brushed over the first time you read it, on a book about ley lines. A single passage warns to heed the instructions _very carefully_ before making the sacrifice to wake the ley line, or else face ‘dire consequences’.

You would not, in a million years, ever believe that ‘dire consequences’ would mean to invite a demon to reside in your sacrifice’s body. Yet here you were.

And there Czerny was.

 

He gets hungry again. He doesn’t even need to tell you; just one look at him and you know that no amount of Pop Tarts will sate his need for human flesh and blood. Which is a shame, because you have _plenty_ of Pop Tarts, and not really a lot of expendable humans.

You pull him out of his bed, giving him a hand up. “C’mon. I’ll take you to a _Denny’s_. You can eat some biker in the parking lot.”

“I don’t want to eat anybody,” he murmurs.

“Well, too fuckin’ bad, Czerny. This is your lot in life. You don’t want to eat people, but you need it to be of any use to me, and I need you to be of _some_ use to me this week. So c’mon.”

He’s the most miserable thing, shrugging into his jacket, slouching over to the door. You’ve noticed lately he hasn’t been the usual gormless beacon of hope he normally is. Even hours after he fed the second time, he was still under the weather.

You’d say something encouraging, but you think it might just come out mean.

You sneak out over the back wall of the academy, and aren’t too surprised to see several other boys doing the exact same thing. You catch a ride with some classmates, who drop you off outside an old farmhouse at your request.

“So, how are we going to do this?” you ponder, while Czerny squats on the ground and puts his hands up over his head. He retches once, twice, and dribbles some black gunk onto the tarmac. _“Nice,”_ you comment, derisive.

“Fuck off,” he wheezes.

You watch the occasional car shoot by. “Maybe we can hitchhike. Get the driver to take us to some remote location.”

Czerny doesn’t protest, so that’s as good as a yes. You let him continue to sit there self-pityingly as you stand by the road and hold up your thumb, hoping to catch a ride with some friendly local who’s driving alone. Ideally what you want is a poor man in his late fifties, who doesn’t own a phone, who goes months without contacting his family, or better yet, has no family to speak of. Somebody who the world wouldn’t miss.

 _“Fuck_ , this is taking forever,” you cry as you’re forced to send another car with children away. It was just past sunset when you snuck off campus; now the sky is all murky blues and greys. You peer over your shoulder at Czerny who’s just sitting there, listening to his mp3 player and blinking back tears. He meets your eye for a second then looks away.

You don’t know why he’s acting like this. He could be a little more grateful that you’re putting your ass on the line just to feed him. For the umpteenth time you switch thumbs as a pick-up truck approaches, trading your sore arm for a partially rested one. “Feel free to not be such a useless waste of space, Czerny.”

You don’t expect this truck to stop or even slow for you – none of them have so far – but this one does. Your chest brightens with hope and you fling yourself at the open window.

You start to grin before you’ve even said anything. Single older male spotted. “You kids need a ride?” the man drawls, Henrietta accent laid on thick.

“Yes, _yes,_ we do, thank you so much, Sir.”

He waves a hand for you to come in, and you hiss over your shoulder, _“Czerny,”_ but he doesn’t hear you. You walk up to him. “Czerny.”

He starts to shake his head.

You’re not giving him a choice here. You haul him up as nicely as possible in front of company, decidedly overlooking the way he bats at you, and take him over to the truck. You open the door, guide Czerny into the backseat, whisper, _“for the love of God, don’t throw up,”_ and belt him in.

You slide into the passenger seat. The driver squints over his shoulder into the back. “Is your friend alright?”

“He’s fine,” you assure him, “he’s just a little drunk. Could you please take us home?”

“Sure thing.”

The man pulls back out onto the road and drives toward the fake address you gave him, in the heart of the country. You glance at Czerny in the wing mirror to see that he’s resorted to hanging his head between his legs and holding a hand over his mouth.

“You kids local or raven boys?” the man asks.

You turn an icy smile on him. You had thought it would be obvious which, but you suppose Czerny’s purposefully slashed jeans and trashy band shirt and fucking terrible attitude brought down your class. “Raven boys.”

The man nods. “I’d thought you were. You don’t much look like the raven boys that I’ve seen. Mind you, I only tend to see ‘em when they come out of their school in their, fancy cars and their, smart uniforms and their… You know, my grandson is a local boy himself, goes to Mountain View, and I tell him that, that he doesn’t need all those fancy brand-name things those posh boys tot around in, he don’t need all that— _hARGH!!_ ”

The truck swerves. You turn your head, confronted with an image you were not prepared to see: Czerny, with eyes like a demon, with a mouth torn open twice its size, with teeth like pin-thin razors, buried into your driver’s neck.

You open your mouth to scream but lose your chance when the truck hits.

 

You blacked out. You must’ve blacked out for a few seconds there, when the car met the ditch with enough force to smack your head into the sun visor. You’re woozy, but as you slowly come to, you have no trouble trying to place the most awful sounds: crunches and slurps and snarls.

You look over and you’re instantly wide awake again. The man has his own decapitated head in his lap and the creature in Czerny’s skin is eating from the neck.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck!”_ you yell, scrambling out of your belt, out of your seat, falling out the door as soon as it opens, and you’re so thankful that it still does. You crawl backwards, trying not to gag at the sight and the smell of Czerny _eating a human,_ but you fail to keep your lunch. You roll onto all fours and vomit into the dirt, breathing heavy, heart pounding, ears still ringing from the crash. You feel sick. You feel so fucking sick.

You wipe your mouth, pick yourself back up unsteadily, and start to limp away. You don’t stop until those _sounds_ are out of earshot, until you’re out of breath.

It takes you some time to calm down. You pat yourself down to check you’re still intact and you didn’t break a bone or knock off a tooth in with all the excitement, but even as the shock starts to subside, there’s not too much pain beyond a headache and a sore neck. “Christ,” you whisper. You were never one for church, but maybe that should change. “Christ…”

You didn’t actually believe you’d get to see Czerny feed. Some morbid part of you wanted to, but you didn’t _actually_ want to. You wanted to look at it from a safe distance, with a lot of warning, laugh “haha gross” and then leave him to it. You didn’t think Czerny would just launch himself at the guy’s neck mid-sentence, when his drivel about his dirt-poor grandson or whatever was milliseconds from lulling you to sleep. You didn’t want to see that. You didn’t want to be strapped into a _moving vehicle_ when it all went down. You could’ve died—you could’ve fucking _died._

You take a deep breath and dare to look back at the scene. The slumped, headless corpse remains, but Czerny is nowhere in sight. “ _Czerny?”_ you yell, but there’s no response. Just the quiet hiss of a totalled truck. “Goddammit…”

You’re forced to walk back over, covering your nose from the fumes and the blood as you do. You walk around the back of the truck to see Czerny huddled beside the back wheel, his hands over his head, snivelling into his knees.

You put your hand out to touch him but then think better of it. The last thing you want to do is startle him, probably.

“Czerny? You ok?”

Without looking at you, he shakes his head.

“Are you hurt? I read that you demons can heal from consuming human flesh, so you should be fine. Eat some more. Hell, take a fucking arm home to snack on… Czerny?”

Still nothing. You bend down in front of him. As tender as you can, you set your hand on his knee.

“Hey, Czerny… Look, it was fucking stupid of you to kill the guy while he was still driving. You’re lucky he couldn’t drive over thirty miles an hour. You could’ve killed us, you prick.” You squeeze his knee. “But, you didn’t. Only you busted our ride back to campus. You’re gonna have to fly us back or some shit now.”

Slowly, Czerny raises his head. After a feed like that, he should be boundless with strength, at the peak of his health, but here he can barely even move. “Is it always going to be like this?”

“Hm?”

He sounds so small. “Me… feeding, this way?”

“…Yeah, probably. Didn’t really see anything in the way of _cures._ I do know how to release the demon from your body—” His head snaps up at that, and you amend, “but it’ll kill whatever’s left of you in the process. Jesus _Christ,_ Czerny, could you clean up a little?”

He rubs the back of his hand over his mouth, but all he does is smear the blood around. At least he got that bit of viscera on his chin. There’s red poking from between his teeth when he asks, “How do you kill the demon?”

You scoff, “ _Relax,_ Czerny, It’s not going to happen. Anyway, with your mystic powers and bloodhound senses, we should be able to wake Glendower in no time. Maybe I’ll even think about asking for your normal life back.”

“Really?”

As soon as you said it, you knew it was a lie. You’re not going to waste that favour on him. You want it for one reason and one reason only: to be filthy, immeasurably rich again. Just about all the other problems you have are an extension of that.

You’re not too sure about Czerny’s problem, but…

Maybe you’ll hire a team of crack demonologists.

You smile at him. “Yeah, maybe.”

He studies you closely for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head at you, eyes betrayed. “You’re lying.”

You ruffle his hair. Your hand comes away bloodied.

 

By the time you make it back to the dorm, it’s past midnight. Every inch of you aches, from burying yet _another_ corpse, from scrubbing the blood on your shoes in a gas station gents’, from shoving Czerny’s head into a sink when he stubbornly refused to cooperate. You honestly want nothing more than to strip off your filthy clothes and lie down for a good twelve, thirteen hours.

But first you need to put Czerny back into his place.

“Thanks for all your help tonight,” you sneer at him, obviously sarcastic, because Czerny was the furthest thing from helpful. He flips you off from across the room. “No, no, don’t be humble; it’s always polite to acknowledge help where it’s warranted. It’s not as if, you know, I was _doing all that shit for you_ or anything.”

“You didn’t do all that shit for me,” Czerny mumbles under his breath, but you can still hear him fine. He sits on the end of his bed and removes his sneakers in the most dramatic, childish way possible. “You did it all for you.”

“For _me?”_

“Everything you do is for you,” he continues. He throws one sneaker so hard at his closet door that it almost ricochets right back at him. “You don’t care about anyone else.”

“Where the fuck is this even coming from? What gave you the idea that I wasn’t fucking _crazy_ about you, Czerny? Haven’t my actions shown that? Aren’t I atoning for what I did before?”

He forces out a weak laugh. “Before… Before what, Whelk?”

You throw off your jacket and fling it into the hamper. You level a cruel look at him. “C’mon, Czerny. Don’t be stupid.”

You look away for literally one second, and by the time you look back, Czerny is standing right in front of you. “Jesus,” you gasp, stepping back.

He stands there, an inch shorter than you, eyes shadowed and tiny fists clenched by his sides. It’s the most threatening display you’ve ever seen from someone who has all the courage of a sheep and all the intimidation of a puppy. “Y’know, you shouldn’t push me around anymore,” he says in a low voice. “I just fed. I’m stronger than you’ll ever be.”

You narrow your eyes at him. “I wouldn’t be so cocky, Czerny, since I’m the only one of us who knows how to kill you.”

“You’ve already killed me once.”

You grimace. You want to slap him, but you feel like that might only provoke him. “You’ve killed more people than I have, smartass.”

“That wasn’t my _choice!”_

“Well, don’t blame me for your appetite, Czerny. You’re the one with a mind and soul weak enough to be possessed by a demon, apparently.”

His lip starts to quiver. _“Fuck_ you, Whelk... Hey, you know why I kept that skateboard? Because it was the only proof I had that you’d _killed_ me. You just… pretended that it never happened. And for a while, I tried that, too. But do you think that, a single day goes by where I don’t remember what you did? Every fucking morning I wake up and remember that you _murdered_ me, just so you could wake your stupid ley lines, and wake your stupid dead king that I never even thought was real. I never believed in magic; I was just going along with it ‘cos you made me. I mean, I… I kind of believe in it now, but—”

“Christ, Czerny,” you sigh. “You can’t even narrate your tragic backstory without your own idiocy side-tracking you.”

“Shut _up!”_ he shouts, and shoves you so hard that the back of your head connects with the wall. You didn’t think you’d even stumble, but Czerny nearly knocked you off your feet. “Shut up, shut up! You… You’ve always been _so mean!_ You were _never_ a good friend! You’ve always teased me, and called me names, and undermined me, and told me that I’m blowing things out of proportion when I take offence at the _horrible_ shit you do and say. Am I still being sensitive when I tell you that you _killing me_ really fucking _traumatised_ me? _Am I, Whelk?”_

You try to push him away, because he’s much too close for your liking. And this confrontation is much too frenzied for your liking.

“Could you back up a bit, Czerny? Your breath smells like rotten carcass.”

Something in him _snaps._ You can see it in his face. You can see it in the way he coils himself up like a serpent.

First, his eyes flicker.

Then his mouth stretches so wide it could pull your whole head off, and rows upon rows of needle-thin teeth start to protrude from his gums.

“C- _Czerny!”_ you cry, but he’s already buried his mouth into your shoulder, and all inclination to play it cool is lost when hundreds of razor pins drive deep into your muscle tissue. You howl out your pain, loud and horrified, before you can even understand what’s happening.

_Oh God, this is it, this is it, he’s going to fucking kill you, he’s going to exact poetic justice on you—_

You feel your warm blood leave your body, soaking into your shirt, sucking up into Czerny’s demonic mouth, and you blindly reach out for something—anything—to club him over the head with. Your hand sprawls across your desk, knocking over books and stationery and a lamp, until your hand finally closes over the neck of a glass bottle, which you don’t hesitate to take to Czerny’s head like you did that day you sacrificed him.

His teeth retract, unsticking from your flesh, and he backs away, holding his hands over his hand, whimpering like a helpless creature. You glance at your shoulder only long enough to check you still _have_ a shoulder – _God,_ you aren’t convinced that his teeth weren’t tinted with venom because the bite surely shouldn’t hurt _this fucking much –_ and then you look for a better weapon that a bottle: something stake-like, something that can be driven through the heart of the host, killing the demon that resides inside. Your eyes fervently scan the room, finding nothing, nothing, nothing, until they catch on a box cutter.

Paranoia demands that you look over your shoulder every two seconds to check he’s not right behind you, but Czerny is slow to rise. He’s still holding his head and trembling violently, and it could be anything from a panic attack to a seizure, but you’re not about to help him after he fucking _bit_ you. Your only focus now is the box cutter.

 _“Whelk,”_ he moans, steadying himself on a chair. He looks up at you, your blood in his teeth, tears of hatred and betrayal in his eyes. “You didn’t have to do that…”

Your shoulder is on fire, but you crank out the blade as far as it will go. You aim it at his heart, ignoring the alarmed look on Czerny’s face.

“Whelk…?”

Before you can even decide if you really want to do this—again—you do it. You run up to Czerny and stick the blade clean in his chest with an unsettling lack of resistance. It practically glides in. Nothing like the skateboard.

You uncurl your hand from around the box cutter. It stays in Czerny’s chest.

Czerny’s legs give out, but you catch him before he can collapse to the floor. You hold him in your lap and watch as he stares wide-eyed and unseeing at the ceiling, red soaking through his shirt around the stuck-in blade, his last few breathes on his lips. You register, _he’s dying,_ and a slew of emotions punch their way up your throat uncomfortably, rival the pain in your shoulder.

“Sorry, Czerny,” you say in a small voice, and his terrified eyes slowly turn to meet yours.

His last breath is a sob.

You don’t stop sobbing until the police find you.

 

As it turns out, you didn’t even need Glendower’s favour.

Not that you’d had the time or resources to continue your search. Unfortunately, when you were forced to stand trial for not one but _three_ murders (you suppose it’s better than four), your claims that “a demon did it” weren’t quite as admissible as you had hoped. And a plea for insanity didn’t work either, so all you effectively did was land yourself in an adult prison for life, and not even in the same facility as your father so he could protect you from the _real_ sadistic killers.

Honestly, the most regrettable part of it all was that you missed Czerny’s funeral. You hope someone remembered to hire Blink182 to play at his wake.

As your bite wound started to heal up into an itchy, scabby thing, you started to wonder if maybe a little demon venom had leaked into you. Czerny was far too paralyzed by fear and trauma to show off any extraordinary demon powers he might’ve obtained in his resurrection, but he must have been _powerful,_ because you’ve inherited some yourself. You can _levitate,_ for one. Super strength, too. And—though you’re not entirely sure this is a _demon_ thing—you can attack as many people as you like to, say, break out of prison, and not feel an ounce of guilt!

You’re finally feel free.

Even after Czerny’s second death, he continued to be useful to you. Classic Czerny.

**Author's Note:**

> hope someone out there enjoyed ???? :'D hmu over at [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)


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